The little one is sleeping, and so I am trying to write a few more Berlinale postings. I want to take these reviews seriously, but I have the distinct fear that it will take me another month to finish them all. There are 20 more to go after all.
Day 4 was Shii’s last Berlinale day, and that is unfortunate because he missed out on quite a few masterpieces. However, generally I would say that the first 4 days had a higher ratio of good movies as opposed to disappointments, of which there really were only two: “We come as friends” and “Ninjo kamifusen”.
Ninjo kamifusen (Humanity and Paper Balloon)
Japan 1937, Sadao Yamanaka, 86′
Setting: A ghetto in Tokyo. Mori, an evil samurai, forces the daughter of a pawn shop owner into marriage with a man she does not love. At the same time, he tries to get rid of the barber Shinza who is secretly organizing casino games at his place. In order to humiliate him, Shinza kidnaps the girl with the help of his neighbor, who is living in poverty and who has been trying to get Mori’s help in vain.
Death count: 5.
I wasn’t really interested in the story in the first place. I am not a big fan of stories set in the samurai times, both from an optical standpoint (boy those outfits are ugly) and when it comes to characters and stories (I just don’t care for samurai, or prostitutes, or yakuza). But this film fit into our schedule well, and there wasn’t really anything else to see at this time slot. For some reason, I was also drawn to the title of the film – “Humanity and paper balloon” sounds like a great movie, no?
While the paper balloons featured in the film are beautiful and make for a nice mood shot at the end, I didn’t see much “humanity” in the film. In my book, everybody in the film was acting like an idiot, Shinza, that neighbor, the pawnshop’s daughter… were they all having a death wish? Besides a few nice touches, the camera work is mostly shoddy, the quality of the acting is sub-par and the story took a turn to the worse with that kidnapping. It’s even impossible to feel sorry for the characters because I always feel like they could just have acted differently.
To be honest this film made me a little scared of old Japanese films. Perhaps only the great masters used to make good movies after all.